This Selected Issues paper analyzes the income dispersion and comovement in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union region. It finds that incomes are diverging, with the Leeward Islands converging to a higher income level than the Windward Islands. The paper examines the macroeconomic impact of...

The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) countries financial system has increasingly come under stress particularly through weakly supervised nonbank and offshore financial sectors with knock-on effects to domestic banks. The staff report focuses on ECCU’s 2009 discussion on common policies...

The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) countries’ economies are heavily dependent on the United States for foreign direct investment, mainly in the tourism sector. The Selected Issues paper discusses economic development and policies of the ECCU. About one-third of the stayover tourists...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes macroeconomic fluctuations in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper describes data, along with the estimation technique used to ensure stationarity of the data. The empirical regularities of macroeconomic fluctuations in the ECCU are...

This 2005 Article IV Consultation highlights that economic activity in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) has accelerated since mid-2003 owing to an acceleration of activity in the tourism and construction sectors. Inflation has been stable and monetary aggregates have been expanding...

This Selected Issues paper analyzes the competitive threats to the tourism sector in the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU). The paper concludes that the ECCU countries have lost competitiveness globally and vis-à-vis newly emergent Caribbean tourist destinations as a result of both price...

This Selected Issues paper on the Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) underlies key features of business cycles. To obtain new measures of classical and growth cycles, simple rules were applied to date turning points in the classical business cycle, and a recently developed frequency domain...

The five Regional Economic Outlooks published biannually by the IMF cover Asia and Pacific, Europe, the Middle East and Central Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Western Hemisphere. In each volume, recent economic developments and prospects for the region are discussed as a whole, as well as for...

The Eastern Caribbean Currency Union (ECCU) has made significant progress in improving the quality and quantity of the macroeconomic statistics it produces and disseminates to the public. The Selected Issues Paper discusses prospects and challenges for credit unions in the ECCU. It reviews the...

The past year has been one of strong economic performance for the Western Hemisphere, notwithstanding somewhat slower growth in the United States in recent quarters. Can this performance be sustained, and what challenges does the region face? Reviewing macroeconomic prospects and risks, this...